Of the many styles of doors, one type of door is referred to as a “barn door.” A barn door is provided directly outside of (or inside of) a doorway opening surrounded by a frame including a pair of opposing jambs below a lintel. The barn door is mounted on a sliding track or other support, typically above the opening and with the door suspended from this track or other sliding support. This track is over the door opening and also to a lateral side of the door opening. The barn door slides on the track between an open position (where it is suspended from the track portions which are laterally spaced to the side of the door opening) to a closed position (where the door is suspended from the track where it is located directly above the door opening). Barn doors are particularly useful when space is not available for a pivoting door and where a wall in which the door is located is too thin to accommodate a pocket door or a pocket door is otherwise undesirable. Barn doors can also be selected for aesthetic reasons or for financial reasons, in that the barn door is a rather simple overall style of door.
One problem with such barn doors is that they typically do not include locks associated therewith. Many doorways benefit from having a door which is lockable, at least for privacy purposes, if not for full security purposes. Accordingly, a need exists for a lockset to facilitate the locking of a barn door. Such a lock should beneficially include some form of emergency entry key to defeat the lock from the outside.
Privacy locks are known for pivoting doors and pocket doors which include a handle or knob which rotates and causes a bolt to translate the engage/disengage and lock/unlock the door. However, such known locks have the handle/knob mounted to the door with the bolt engaging/disengaging the doorway jamb. With a barn door, such a known prior art lock is not effective because the door is not aligned coplanar with the wall plane, but rather is offset from the wall plane. Thus, some other solution is needed to the problem of providing a privacy lock on a barn door.